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Animal Farm

It is the history of a revolution that went wrong — and of theexcellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for the perversion ofthe original doctrine’, wrote Orwell in the original blurb for the firstedition of Animal Farm in 1945. His simple and tragic fable has become aworld-famous classic of English prose.

George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair. The change of thename corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell’s life-style, in which hechanged from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literaryand political rebel.

Orwell is famous for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four.In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the storyof the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In this bookthe group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitativehuman masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventuallythe animals intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert therevolution and form a dictatorship whose bondage is even more oppressive aheartless than that of their former masters.

Orwell derived his inspiration from the mood of Britain in the ‘40s.Animal Farm confronted the unpalatable truth that the victory over Fascismwould in some respects unwittingly aid the advance of totalitarianism ,while in Nineteen Eighty-four warns the dangers to the individual ofenroaching collectivism. In these last, bleak fables Orwell attempted tomake the art of political writing in the traditions of Swift and Defoe. Themost world-known Gulliver’s Travels. This satire? First published in 1726,relates to the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon on a merchant ship,and it shows the vices and defects of man and human institutions. So faras satire has become the subject of our research-work, it is necessary welook at the nature and sources of comic.

What is comic? Similar considerations apply to the historicallyearlier forms and theories of the comic. In Aristotle’s view ‘laughter wasintimately related to ugliness and debasement’. Cicero held that theprovince of the ridiculous lay in the certain baseness and deformity. In19th century Alexander Bain, an early experimental psychologist, thoughtalone these lines ‘not in physical effects alone, but in everything wherea man can achieve a stroke of superiority, in surpassing or discomforting arival is the disposition of laughter apparent.’ Sidney notes that ‘whilelaughter comes from delight not all objects of delight cause laugh. We areravished in delight to see a fair woman and yet are far from being moved tolaughter. We laugh at deformed creatures, wherein certainly we candelight’. Immanuel Kant realized that what causes laughter is ‘the suddentransformation of a tense expectation into nothing’. This can be achievedby incongruity between form and content, it is when two contradictorystatements have been telescoped into a line whose homely, admonitory soundconveys the impression of a popular adage. In a similar way nonsense verseachieves its effect by pretending to make sense. It is interesting to notethat the most memorable feature of Animal Farm — the final revision of theanimals revolutionary commandments: ‘All animals are equal but some animalsare more equal than others’, is based on that device.

Other sources of innocent laughter are situations in which the partand the home change roles and attention becomes focused on a detail tornout of the functional defect on which its meaning depends. ‘A bird’s wing,comrades, is an organ of propulsion not of manipulation’. Orwell displacesattention from meaning to spelling. One of the most popular comic devicesis impersonation. The most aggressive form of impersonation is parody,designed to deflate hollow pretense, to destroy illusion and to underminepathos by harping on the weaknesses of the victim. Orwell resorts to thatdevice describing Squealer:’ The best known among them was a small fat pignamed Squealer with very round cheeks, twinkling eyes, nimble movements anda shrill voice. He was a brilliant talker:’

A succession of writers from the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanesthrough Swift to George Orwell, have used this technique to focus attentionon deformities of society that, blunted by habit , are taken for granted.Satire assumes standards against which professions and practices vicious,the ironic perception darkens and deepens. The element of the incongruouspoint in the direction of the grotesque which implies an admixture ofelements that do not march. The ironic gaze eventually penetrates to avision of the grotesque quality of experience, marked by the discontinuityof word and deed and the total lack of coherence between the appearance andreality. This suggests one of the extreme limits of comedy, the satiricextreme in which the sense of the discrepancy between things as they areand things they might be or ought to be has reached to the borders of thetragedy.

Early theories of humor, including even those of Bergson and Freud,treated it as an isolated phenomenon, without attempting to throw light onthe intimate connections between the comic and tragic, between laughter andcrying. Yet these two domains of creative activity form a continuum with nosharp boundaries between wit and ingenuity. The confrontation betweendiverse codes of behavior may yield comedy, tragedy or new psychologicalinsights. Humor arouses malice and provides a harmless outlet for it.Comedy and tragedy, laughter and weeping yields further clues of thischallenging problem. The detached malice of the comic impersonator thatturns pathos into bathos, tragedy into travesty. Comedy is an imitation ofcommon errors of our life, which representeth in the most ridiculous andscornful sorts that may be.

Surely satire reflects changes in political and cultural climate andit had it’s ups and downs. George Orwell’s satire of the 20th century ismuch more savage than that of Jonathan Swift in 18th century. It is only inthe mid 20th century that the savage and the irrational have come to beviewed as part of the normative condition of the humanity rather than astragic aberration from it. The savage and irrational amount to grotesqueparodies of human possibility, ideally conceived. Thus it is the 20thcentury novelists have recognized the tragicomic nature of the contemporaryhuman image and predicament, and the principal mode of representing both isthe grotesque. This may take various forms. In Animal Farm it takes a formof apocalyptic nightmare of tyranny and terror.

The satire in Animal Farm has two important aims — both based on therelated norms of limitation and moderation. First, Animal Farm exposes andcriticizes extremist political attitudes as dangerous. On the one hand, itsatirizes the mentality of the utopian revolutionary — the belief atthrough the conscious effort of a ruling elite a society can be suddenlysevered from its past and fashioned into a new, rational system. Implicitin Snowball’s vision of high technology modernization is the extirpation ofthe animals’ resent agricultural identity as domesticated creatures and —if Boxer’s goal of improving his mind is any indication , their eventualtransformation into Houyhnhnms. Instead, Snowball’s futuristicincantations conjure up the power-hungry and pleasure-loving Napoleon.

An allegorical view of reality – the thing said or displayed reallymeaning something else—suited the Marxist-oriented social criticism of the1930s,which was indefatigable in pointing out an economically self-servingmotives underlying the surface features of modern bourgeois society. Oneform of allegory is the masque, a spectacle with masked participants.

Analyzing the novel we can hardly determine comedy from tragedy. Wecan’t find those sharp boundaries which divide these two. Orwell can becalled the true expert of man’s psychology. Cause only a man who studiedpsychology of the crowd could create such a vivid image of characters,which we see in Animal Farm. Describing the characters Orwell attachesgreat significance to the direct remarks which help the reader to determinewho is the victim and who is hunter in the novel. The features of theanimals are : ‘A white stripe down his nose gave him somewhat stupidappearance’, ‘Mollie , foolish, pretty white mare’. Stupidity becomes akind of leitmotif in the description of the animals. Pigs on the contraryare represented as very clever animals: ‘the pigs were so clever that theycould think of the way round every difficulty’, ‘with their superiorknowledge…’

The author creates the image of the crowd which plays a very importantrole in the novel. What is a crowd? This is not only mass of individualsif to look deeper from the psychological point of view we shall find outthat crowd is a gathering of people under the definite conditions which hasits traits, which differ from that of single individual. The consciousperson disappears , besides feelings and ideas of everyone who forms thatgathering which is called crowd, receive united , indivisible direction.Orwell ridiculed that vice of the society. In this respect it takes theform of innocent laughter. Old Major found an answer to all problems of theanimals and opened the thing on which ‘the support and pleasure’ of theirdays depend on. ‘It is summed up in a single word— Man. Man is the onlyreal enemy we have’. That episode makes the reader laugh but at the sametime this very moment can be considered the tragic one, as the victim ofthe crowd has been chosen and pointed out and now nothing can stop theproces. 'It is not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the ivels of thelife of ours spring ffrom the tyrany of human beings? Only get rid of Man,and the produce of our labour would be our own.Almost overnight we canbecome rich and free.’

Major provides animals with scapegoat. In the nature of individual theimage of an enemy excites aggressiveness but in the dimensions of thecrowd the hostility increases thousands times. S.Moskovichy wrote in hisbook ‘The machine that creates Gods’, that ‘society is ruled by passions onwhich one should play and even stimulate them in order to have anopportunity to rule them and to subordinate to intellect’. Having read thatepisode we don’t pay attention to it’s deep psychological sense, but simplyenjoy the humor with which the author speaks of it.

Orwell uses very popular device he gives the description of thecharacter and at the end he gives a short remark which completely destroythe created image: ‘Old Major was so highly regarded on the farm thateveryone was quite ready to lose an hours sleep in order to hear what hehad to say… they nestled down inside it and promptly fell asleep’,’shepurred contentedly throughout Majors speech without listerning to a word ofwhat he was saying’. He uses the same device in the situation when OldMajor is telling the animals about the song : ‘Many years ago when I was alittle pig, my mother and other sows used to sing an old song of which theyknew only the tune and the first three words I had known that tune ininfancy , but it had long since past out of my mind, last night however itcame back to me in my dream’. The reader is carefully prepared to hear somekind of patriotic march but instead of that the author in one sentencebreaks down the created image: ‘It was a stirring tune something between‘Clementine’ and ‘La Cucaracha’.Through those short remarks we learn theattitude the author towards what is going on in his novel. He laughs at hisheroes pretending that the things he speaks about to be very importantwhile making the reader understand the contrary thing.We can see hear againan integral part of any kind of humour-incongruity between the reality andthe situation as it is said to be. The lack of coherance between things init’s turn lead to the very invisible boundary between comedy and tragedy.

Orwell’s novel is always balancing between tragedy and comedy. InAnimal Farm Orwell is exposing the selfish power-hunger of the few behind acollectivist rhetoric used to gull the many . And in at least two Orwell’sallegorical exposure is also an exposure of allegory. Because the surfacefiction tends to be considered of lesser importance than the impliedmeaning , allegory is inherently hierarchical , and the insistence on thedominant meaning makes it an authoritarian mode.

If allegory tends to subordinate narrative to thesis, the structure ofallegory, it’s dualistic form, can be emphasized to restore a balancebetween fictional events and conceptual massage. In Animal Farm there aresigns of a balance struck between satiric devices allegorically martialedto expose and assault a dangerous political myth and collateral apoliticalelements — the latter akin to the ‘solid objects and useless scraps ofinformation’.

Orwell allows the reader to fix disgust at cruelty, torture andviolence on one leading character—Napoleon. The way Orwell presents thefigure is structural, in that the figure of the Napoleon clarifies hispolitical intent for the reader. There is no doubt about the way the readerfeels toward Napoleon, but Orwell’s handling of him is all the moreeffective for combining ‘humor with the disgust’.’Napoleon was a large,rather fierce looking Berkshire boar, the only Berkshire on the farm, notmuch of a talker but with the reputation for going his own way’.

Orwell presents Napoleon to us in ways they are, at first amusing as,for example, in the scene where he shows his pretended disdain atSnowball’s plans for the windmill, by lifting his leg and urinating on thechalked floor. ‘One day ,however, he arrived unexpectedly to examine theplans. He walked heavily round the shed, looked closely at every detail ofthe plans and snuffed at them once or twice, then stood for a little whilecontemplating them out of the corner of his eye; then suddenly he liftedhis leg, urinated over the plans and walked out without uttering a word.’The increasing tension of description is broken down immediately this makesthe reader smile. Besides the author speaks of Napoleon’s ridiculous deedsin such a natural way, as that is the normal kind of behavior that we justcan’t stand laughing. ‘Napoleon produced no schemes of his own, but saidquietly that Snowball’s would come to nothing’. Napoleon is seen to have norespect for Snowball who creates the plans. This is most apparent in hisurinating on them which emphasises his brutal and uncivilised character.Animals urinate on objects to mark their territory. This is symbolic asNapoleon later takes the idea for the windmill as his own.

On the allegorical level the differing views of socialism held byTrotsky and Stalin are apparent. In contrast with Snowball’s speeches,Napoleon merely makes the minimum response and when he does speak it isusually to criticise Snowball. Speech becomes less and less important toNapoleon. The sheep with their mindless bleating effectively silence theopposing opinions as no-one else can be heard. ‘ It was noticed that theywere specially liable to break ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’ in thecrucial moments of Snowball’s speeches. Snowball’s reduction of Animalismfor the benefit of stupider animals and the way the sheep mindlessly takeit up , parodies the way socialist ideology reduces itself to simplyformulas that everyone can understand, but which stop any kind of thought.In the Communist Manifesto, for example, there is the following sentence :‘The theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence:‘Abolition of private property’’. Set this beside the basic principle ofAnimalism: ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’. Orwell’s feelings about dangersof over simplification are clear. ‘The more short the statement is the moreit is deprived from any kind of provement, the more it influences thecrowd. The statement exert influence only if it is repeated very often, inthe same words’. Napoleon said that ‘there is only one figure of the theoryof orators art,which deserves attention —repetition. By the means ofrepetition an idea installs in the minds so deeply, that at last it isconsidered to be the proved truth.

What the truth is? The Russian dictionary gives the difinition oftruth as:the truth is ,what corresponds to the reality. But is it alwaysso? Very often it happens so that we exept as the true the false thingswhich we want to be true, or the things that someone whant us to exept.That is one of the most intresting perculiarities of man’s psychology, thatOrwell ridicules.There is one univerce truth , but the man has a strangehabit to purvert truth.

Napoleon appears to have gained the support of dogs and sheep and ishelped by the fickle nature of the crowd.

From the start it seems, Napoleon turns events to his own advantage.When the farm is attacked in the ‘Battle of Cowshed’, Napoleon is nowhereto be seen. Cowardice is hinted ft and his readiness to rewrite historylater in the novel shows the ways in which Napoleon is prepared to twistthe truth for his own ends. The Seven Commandments in which are condifiedthe ethnical absolutes of the new order, are perverted throughout the bookto suit his aims.

There is an interesting thing to notice about Seven Commandments. Thatis an important device to use the ‘lucky number’ to deepen the impressionof animals misfortune. Every time the changing of the commandment takesplace, we see an example of how the political power , as Orwell sees it, isprepared to alter the past in peoples minds, if the past prevents it fromdoing what he wishes to do. Firstly the fourth commandment is altered inorder that pigs could sleep comfortably in warm beds. A simple addition oftwo words does it. ‘read me the fourth commandment. Does it not saysomething about sleeping in beds? With some difficulty Muriel spelt it out.‘It says that ‘ no animal shall sleep in the bed with sheets’’. Wheneverthe pigs infringe one of Major’s commandments, Squealer is sent to convincethe other animals that that is the correct interpretation . ‘you didn’tsuppose , surely, that there was ever a ruling against beds? A bed merelymeans the place to sleep in. A pile of straw in a stall is a bed, properlyregarded. The rule was against sheets, which are a human invention’.

Napoleon secures his rule through an unpleasant mix of lies distortionand hypocrisy / there are two scenes where Napoleon’s cruelty and coldviolence are shown in all their horror : the scene of the trials and theepisode where Boxer is brought to the knacker’s. The veil of mockery isdrown aside. In these episodes humour is absent, the stark reality ofNapoleons hunger for power, and the cruelty< and death it involves arepresented. Orwell reminds of the ‘heavy’ stink of blood, and associatesthat smell with Napoleon.

‘And so the tale of confessions and executions went on, until therewas a pile of corpses lying before the Napoleon’s feet and the air washeavy with the smell of blood, which had been unknown there since theexpulsion of Jones’.

Napoleon in the novel stands for Joseph Stalin, and of course we can’tomit the way the author skillfully creates this character. Everything frompurvation of communist ideology to the cult of personality of Stalin, foundit’s reflection in the novel.

Orwell in the cruelest kind of parody gives to Napoleon such titlesas: ‘Our ,leader, Comrade Napoleon’, ‘The Farther of all animals, Terror of Mankind, Protector of the Sheepfold, Ducklin’s Friend.’

The novel mainly is based on the historical facts, and even therelationships of Soviet Union and Germany are shown in that fairy tale. Forthe all cleverness of the Napoleon, though, he is fooled by Frederic ofPinchfield ( he stands for Hitler’s Germany) who gets the timber out ofhim, pays him false money, then attacks the farm, and blows up thewindmill.

Orwell’s satire will be no iconoclastic wrecking job on the StalinistRussia whose people had been suffering so cruelly from the war and whosesoldiers , under Stalin’s leadership, were locked in desperate combat withthe German invader even as Animal Farm was being written. That Orwell’sassault is primarily on an idea, the extremists fantasy of technologicalutopianism devoid of hard work, and less a living creature, the commanderis chief, is demonstrating during the most dramatic moment of FarmerFrederick’s attack on the farm—the juxtaposition of dynamited windmill andthe figure of Napoleon alone standing unbowed. And despite Orwell’sfascination with Gulliver’s Travels, it is a sign of his attempt to drawback from the Swiftian revulsion at the flash — a disgust that , as Orwelllater noted could extend to political behavior — toward the more balancedand positive view of life that Animal Farm, despite it’s violence, has fewreferences to distasteful physical realities, and those two areappropriate to the events of the narrative.

Napoleon is a simple figure. Orwell makes no attempt as to givereasons as to why he comes to act the way he does. If Napoleon was a humancharacter in the novel, if this where a historical novel about a historicalfigure Orwell would have had to make Napoleon convincing in human terms.But isn’t human and this is not a novel. It is an animal fable and Orwellpresents the figure of Napoleon in ways that make us see clearly anddespise what he stands for. He is simplified for the sake of clarity. Helends force of Orwell’s political massage, that power tends to corrupt, byallowing the reader to fix his disgust at cruelty torture and violence.

The primary objective of the tale is that we should loathe Napoleonfor what he stands for. The other animals are used to intensify our disgustor else to add color and life to the tale by the addition of the farmyarddetail. The most significant of the other animals is undoubtedly the cart-horse Boxer, and in his handling of him Orwell shows great expertise incontrolling the readers reactions and sympathies and in turning themagainst what is hates.

Throughout the novel boxer is the very sympathetic figure. Honest andhardworking, he is devoted to the cause in a simple-minded way, althoughhis understanding of the principles of Animalism is very limited. He isstrong and stands nearly eighteen feet high, and is much respected by theother animals. He has two phrases which for him solve all problems, one, ‘Ishall work harder’, and later on, despite the fact that Napoleon’s rule isbecoming tyrannical, ‘Napoleon is always right’. At one point he doesquestion Squealer, when he, in his persuasive way, is convincing theanimals that Snowball was trying to betray them in the Battle of Cowshed.Boxer at first can not take this, he remembers the wound Snowball receivedalong his back from Jones’s gun. Squealer explains this by saying that ‘ithad been arranged for Snowball to be wounded, it had all been part ofJones’s plan’. Boxer’s confused memory of what actually happened makes him‘a little uneasy’ but when Squealer announces , very slowly that Napoleon‘categorically’ states that Snowball was Jones’s agent from the start thenthe honest cart-horse accepts the absurdity without question.

Orwell through the figure of Boxer is presenting a simple good-nature, which wishes to do good, and which believes in the Rebellion. So loyal isBoxer that he is prepared to sacrifice his memory of facts, blurred as itis. Nevertheless, so little is he respected, and so fierce is the hatredthe pigs hatred the pigs have for even the slightest questioning of theirlaw that, when Napoleon’s confessions and trials begin, Boxer is among thefirst the dogs attack. Wish his great strength he has no difficulty incontrolling them: He just simply, almost carelessly ‘put out his great hoof, caught a dog in mid-air, and pinned him to the ground’. At a word fromNahjleon he lets the dog go , but still he doesn’t realize he is a target.Boxer’s blind faith in the pigs is seeming disastrous. Confronted with thehorrifying massacre of the animals on the farm, Boxer blames himself andburies himself in his work. This show of power pleases us as a reader, inwhat we like to think of physical strength being allied to good nature,simple though a good nature may be. Boxer has our sympathy because he giveshis strength selflessly for what he believes, whereas Napoleon givesnothing , believes in nothing and never actually works. Boxer exhaustshimself for the cause. Every time the animals have to start rebuilding ofthe windmill he throws himself into the task without a word of complaint,getting up first half an hour, then three quarters of an hour beforeeverybody else.

Boxer’s sacrificial break down in the service of what he and the otherworker animals believed to be technological progress might be interpretedas allegorically portending the future deterioration of the animalcommunity.

At last his strength gives out and when it does his goodness isunprotected. The pigs are going to send him to the knacker’s to be killedand boiled out into glue. Warned by Benjamin the donkey (his close, silentfriend throughout the book), and by Clover he tries to kick his way out ofthe van, but he has given all his energy to the pigs and now has none leftto save himself. The final condition of Boxer, inside the van about tocarry him to the knacker’s in exchange for money needed to continue work onthe windmill, emblematically conveys a message close to the spirit ofOrwell’s earlier warnings : ‘The time had been when a few kicks of Boxershoofs would have smashed the van to mach wood. But alas! His strength hadleft him; and in the few moments the sound of drumming hoofs grew fainterand died away’. This is the most moving scene in a book Indeed our feelingshere as reader’s are so simple, deep and uninhibited that as Edward Thomashas said movingly, ‘we weep for the terrible pity of it like children whomeet injustice for the first time.

Boxer can be attributed to the tragic heroes cause he doesn’tstruggle with the injustice as the tragic hero should do. And surely we canconsider him a comical hero as all through the story the reader hascompassion on him. Orwell managed to unite tragedy and comedy in onecharacter. Boxer arouses mixed contradictory feelings. His story is nolonger comic, but pathetic and evokes not laughter but pity. It is anaggressive element, that detached malice of the comic impersonator, whichturns pathos into bathos and tragedy into travesty.

Not only Boxer’s story reminds us more of a tragedy. The destiny ofall animals makes us weep. If at the beginning of the novel they are ‘happyand excited’ in the middle ‘they work like slaves but still happy’, at theend ‘they are shaken and miserable’. After Napoleon’s dictatorship hasshowed it’s disregard for the facts and it’s merciless brutality, after theanimals witnessed the forced confessions and the execution, they all go tothe grassy knoll where the windmill is being built Clover thinks back onMajor’s speech before he died, and thinks how far they had gone from whathe would have intended: ‘as Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filledwith tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been tosay that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselvesyears ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. This scenes ofterror and slaughter where not what they had looked forward to on thatnight when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself hadhad any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set freefrom hunger and whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity,the strong protecting the week. Instead — she did not know why — they hadcome to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogsroamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to piecesafter confessing to shocking crimes’.

From the sketch of the political background to Animal Farm it will bequite clear that the main purpose of that episode is to expose the liewhich Stalinist Russia had become. It was supposed to be a Socialist Unionof States, but it had become the dictatorship. The Soviet Union in factdamaged the cause of the true socialism. In a preface Orwell wrote toAnimal Farm he says that ‘for the past ten years I have been convinced thatthe distruction of Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival ofsocialist movement’. Animal Farm attempts, through a simplification ofSoviet history, to clarify in the minds of readers what Orwell felt Russiahad become. The clarification is to get people to face the facts ofinjustice, of brutality, and hopefully to get them to think out forthemselves some way in which a true and ‘democratic socialism’ will bebrought about. In that episode Orwell shows his own attitude to what ishappening on his fairy farm. And he looks at it more as at the tragedy thana comedy, but still he returns to his genre of satire and writes: ‘therewas no thought of rebellion or disobedience in her mind. She knew that evenas things were they were far better than they had been in the days ofJones, and that before all else it was needful to prevent the return of thehumanbeings’.

Finally, the moderateness of Orwell’s satire is reinforced by atreatment of time that encourages the reader’s sympathetic understanding ofthe whole revolutionary experiment from it’s spontaneous and joyousbeginnings to it’s ambiguous condition on the final page. A basic strategyof scathing social satire is to dehistoricize the society of the specificsociopolitical phenomena being exposed to ridicule and condemnation.

In Animal Farm the past that jolts the creatures from the timelesspresent of the animal condition into manic state of historicalconsciousness is a quick, magically transformative moment .